BER Analysis of NOMA-Enabled Visible Light Communication Systems With Different Modulations

Visible light communication (VLC) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are deemed two promising technologies in the next generation wireless communication systems in achieving high capacity and massive connectivity. In this paper we study the performance of a NOMA-enabled VLC system using different modulation schemes. In particular system level bit error rate (BER) is derived for different modulation schemes. Conventional methods used for analyzing the BER under orthogonal multiple access cannot be directly applied to NOMA. In order to obtain the closed-form BER expressions for the NOMA-enabled VLC systems, an analytical framework based on bitwise-decision axis and signal space is proposed.Moreover, the analysis method can be extended to the any wireless communication networks with NOMA. Simulation results demonstrate the accuracy of the theoretical analysis. The study shows that the BER gap among users decreases with the increase of the modulation order but at the cost of a higher power consumption in order to achieve a better signal to noise ratio. It is observed that 8-PSK modulation in NOMA-enabled VLC systems strikes a good tradeoff between the power cost and the achievable BER.